Today wasn’t a day for paradigm-shifting product announcements from Apple, but you’ve got to be impressed nonetheless.  Every product that was updated or launched today showcased the company’s attention to detail, the consistency of its design philosophy, and the complementary nature of its product line.

With the release of the Magic Trackpad, you can feel Apple’s swagger as it pushes the industry down the path of touch as a primary user interface.  It started with the iPhone, then the iPad Touch, the multi-touch MacBook Pro, the iPad, and now the Magic Trackpad.  This is steady, incremental innovation and Apple’s discipline to execute against a consistent design philosophy over a multi-year period is impressive.

Then take the seemingly mundane Apple Battery Charger.  On first glance, it is barely interesting enough to get your attention, but upon further review, you realize that Apple pulled “an Apple”.  It took a 1980s technology and improved performance, all the while making it a perfect complement to the existing wireless Apple products.  Apple has instantly created what is now a best-in-class family of wireless input devices when the Apple Battery Charger is placed alongside the Magic Trackpad and the pre-existing Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard.

And the updated iMacs, Mac Pros, and 27″ Cinema Display?  All great upgrades to existing products.  In this group though, the nod has to go to the Cinema Display.  Yes, it is a “monitor”.  Yes, it is an expensive piece of hardware,  but who wouldn’t want one if you own an Apple computer of any sort?  Whether you own a MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iMac, or Mac Mini, the Cinema Display feels like it was designed specifically for your computer.

The Apple product line is now a matrix of  products that are so complementary of each other, that it is hard to imagine customers leaving the Apple ecosystem once they have dipped their toe into the water.

What I’d really like is improved handling of event reminders. Including a way to keep my laptop, iPad, and iPhone from all buzzing an event reminder at the same time if they’re in proximity to one another, as well as syncing the dismissal of on-display reminders.

via David Chartier on MobileMe Calendar Beta – Shawn Blanc.

Great idea.  This definitely passes the “never knew I needed it until I saw it” test.

Squeeze Hidden Functionality Out of Every Corner of Your Mac with the Option Key.

I would be shocked if you didn’t pick up a couple of new OS X tricks after reading this Lifehacker article.

Until iTunes 9.0.2, if you had a smart playlist parameter that said the song had to be unrated un-starred, and — while listening to the playlist — you rated a song, the playlist would stop immediately because the just-rated song would disappear from it.

In the new version if you rate a playing song that disappears from a smart playlist, iTunes simply jumps to the next song and begins playing.

via iTunes gets smart playlist rating bug fix – Finer Things in Mac.

A friend of mine once walked into a souvenir shop and saw a t-shirt with a picture of William Shatner as Captain Kirk screaming “KHAAAAAAN!” from the infamous scene in Star Trek II.  It put a huge smile on his face because we always joked that was Shatner’s finest acting performance, and at that moment he immediately realized we were not alone in our assessment.  There were other people who, unbeknownst to us, shared our amused appreciation of it.

Reading that Apple fixed this smart playlist bug made me feel the exact same way.   I never knew if the “disappearing song” issue was a feature or a bug, but it sure drove me crazy.  I’m glad to see that, once again, I wasn’t alone.

Daring Fireball: Translation From Apples Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4.

Absolute gold.

It turns out that FaceTime is like an Egg McMuffin and not like Coca-Cola. Coke is a combination of many readily-available ingredients plus the mysterious, top-secret, and proprietary Merchandise “X” that turns a Cola into a Coke. When Apple created the FaceTime standard, they combined existing, open, off-the-shelf standards for network communication, handshaking, and media streaming into a new recipe, creating a technique that practically anybody can replicate.

via iPhone 4 review: It’s a brand new, better smartphone :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko.

These are the treasures that await when you take the time to read a 6000-word Andy Ihnatko review.  Not only is Andy the only journalist I can think of who would even put an analogy like this into a review, he is the only one who could pull it off.

The system would allow users to essentially feel the screen as they manipulate objects on it. One example included in the application has a user pinching to zoom in on a map of California. The haptic feedback would follow their fingers as they pulled apart on the device. In this example, the haptic feedback would be less when the fingers are closer together, and greater as the fingers move apart.

The haptic feedback could also be used to let users know when a certain boundary is being approached. For example, the feedback could become greater if a user is zoomed in as far as they can go, letting the user know that they can not zoom in any farther. The application notes that the zoom gesture method could be particularly beneficial in publishing, photo and drawing programs.

via AppleInsider | Apple investigating multi-haptic feedback for multi-touch devices.

Apple files a lot of patents, so who knows if this is going to make it into a product, but ever since the iPhone came out I hoped this would be the next big advance.

If this technology can be executed on the iPad, it would be a revolutionary and completely amazing user interface.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Safari on the iPad supports bookmarklets in the Bookmarks Bar.  If you’re looking to add the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet, I don’t believe Tumblr has an updated Goodies page that lets you drag the bookmarklet straight to the iPad Bookmarks Bar.  So here’s how to do it:

1. Create a bookmark in Safari (it can be any page) and name it “Share on Tumblr”.  Save it in the Bookmarks Bar” folder.
2. Edit the bookmark and delete what is currently in the address field.
3. Copy this Tumblr javascript code from Safari on your iPad, and then paste it into the address field.
4. Save the bookmark.

The process is a little cumbersome, but once you understand the concept keep in mind that you can do it for any bookmarklet.

I loved this comment from Henry Blodget of Business Insider in the wake of the latest emails from Steve Jobs about the Apple and Adobe wars:

This habit of Steve’s of responding to emails is remarkably winning, by the way.  He somehow manages to be god-like and accessible at the same time, which makes him even more god-like.

Via: Steve Jobs Weighs In on Adobe Flash Furor